I read this ahead of the reading list for the RBS course 19th and 20th Century Typography, and thank goodness I did. This gave me a good grounding and was fun and amusing - I didn't want to put it down, and recommend it to anyone who wants an accessible introduction to the history of typefaces.

I can't believe I'm giving 5 stars to another book - the only disappointment was that it ended too abruptly. ( )

Once the printing press was invented, nothing would ever be the same. If it wasn't for the printing press, almost none of us would get to read all our precious books. And without font, there would be nothing to read on those pages.

Due to my veracious need to read about the history of everything I can, I looked forward to this book. I am not a huge geek of font or typeface (and in reading this book, I realized that there is quite a following of those that are) but this book was enjoyable. Capable of being read whether a huge fan of font or knowing very little about it. I learned about why the saying “mind your p's and q's” came about and why they are called upper and lower cases among many many other facts. I learned, and was amazed, at how much work goes into making a new font, the people behind those fonts, and just how many there really are out there. The author makes this an interesting and at times humorous read. Well researched but definitely not as dry as I expected it to be. ( )

In Budapest, surgeons operated on printer's apprentice Gyoergyi Szabo, 17, who, brooding over the loss of a sweetheart, had set her name in type and swallowed the type.Time magazine, 28 December 1936

Dedication

To Ben and Jake

First words

On 12th June 2005, a fifty-year-old man stood up in front of a crowd of students at Stanford University and spoke of his campus days at a lesser institution, Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Quotations

'Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to' Eric Gill

Last words

This made it the most widely used font in the western world. But did it also make it the best font? Or the most versatile? Or the most seductive, surprising and beautiful? Of course not. That font is yet to come.

Wikipedia in English (8)

Just My Type is a book of stories about fonts. It examines how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. It explains why we are still influenced by type choices made more than 500 years ago, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. It profiles the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, as well as people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook. The book is about that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about. And beyond all this, the book reveals what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world – and what your choice of font says about you.

Haiku summary

▾Book descriptions

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▾Library descriptions

A romp through the history of fonts and the lives of the great typographers, revealing the extent to which fonts are not only shaped by but also define the world in which we live.